Another photographer who is getting more recognition. Out of the work I have seen the portraits are the strongest. Some of them feel like precursors to the confronting portraits of women made by Diane Arbus while others offer a more reflective, contemplative examination of human presence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Alicia Colen for her help and to the Howard Greenberg Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
Howard Greenberg Gallery is proud to present the recently discovered work of street photographer, Vivian Maier (1926-2009), from the Maloof Collection.
A nanny by trade, Vivian Maier’s street and travel photography was discovered by John Maloof in 2007 at a local auction house in Chicago. Always with a Rolleiflex around her neck, she managed to amass more than 2,000 rolls of films, 3,000 prints and more than 100,000 negative which were shared with virtually no one in her lifetime. Her black and white photographs-mostly from the 50s and 60s-are indelible images of the architecture and street life of Chicago and New York. She rarely took more than one frame of each image and concentrated on children, women, the elderly, and indigent. The breadth of Maier’s work also reveals a series of striking self-portraits as well as prints from her travels to Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, and the American Southwest, among dozens of other international cities.
“My fascination with her story has only grown, as has my involvement with her photographs. It is such an unusual story with no resolution. At first her images are extremely well seen, quality photographs of life on the street, in New York City and Chicago. But as one looks at the body of her work, she reveals her deeper interests. Then one tries to imagine who she was, what motivated her, her personality. It is not everyday that one becomes so involved and even obsessed with a particular photographer,” comments Howard Greenberg.
What little is known about Maier’s life is the result of John Maloof’s extensive research. He discovered her obituary on line in 2009 which was just the beginning of his investigative work. An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Maier split her time between Europe and the US, returning to NY in 1951. In 1956, she ultimately settled in Chicago where she worked as nanny for more than forty years. For a brief period in the 1970s she worked as a nanny to journalist, Phil Donahue’s children. Towards the end of her life, Maier was supported by the children she had cared for in the early 50s. Unbeknownst to them, one of Maier’s storage lockers (containing her massive group of negatives) was auctioned off due to delinquent payments.
After purchasing the first collection of Maier photographs in 2007, Maloof acquired more from another buyer at the same auction. He has since established the Maloof Collection to promote the work of Vivian Maier and to safeguard the archive for future generations. The archive consists of approximately 100,000 to 150,000 negatives; over 3,000 prints; hundreds of rolls of film; home movies; audio tape interviews, and other items representing roughly 90% of Maier’s work. Through Maloof’s efforts, Vivian Maier’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and have received significant critical attention. In November, Powerhouse Books will publish Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, edited by Maloof with a foreword by Geoff Dyer. John Maloof is also co-producing a documentary about Vivian Maier.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Self-portrait in Punk Jacket 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus Sucking His Thumb 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus in his Punk Jacket, Punt Road, South Yarra 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus as The Fool (posing for the sculptor Fredrick White) 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude, in the Flat, Rear of Derelict House, 455, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Self-portrait, nude with the mural ‘Two boys on a car’ 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Floor (with Clifford Last) 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Couch, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Couch, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Curator: Michal Raz-Russo, museum exhibition coordinator and associate curator
Many thankx to The Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Artist unknown (American) [Three women] c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 14.7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) The Three Graces c. 1930s Gelatin silver print The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Look Pleasant c. 1910s Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 8.6cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three women] c. 1910s Gelatin silver print 11.6 x 6.8cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Untitled 1910/1940 Image: 7.7 x 5.2cm (3 1/16 x 2 1/16 in.) Paper: 8.6 x 6.1 cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
After George Eastman introduced the handheld Kodak #1 camera in 1888, amateurs made millions of snapshots depicting friends and family, travels, and festive occasions such as weddings. Even while solidifying such thoroughly conventional behaviours, amateur photography developed a new pictorial language that privileged immediacy, spontaneity, and accident. Career photographers and art historians – but also antiques vendors and flea-market shoppers – have long recognised the value of the “snapshot aesthetic.” The rise of social media and smartphones in recent years has effectively ended the era of the snapshot as both a printed photograph and an image for a private audience.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Artist unknown (American) Untitled (Summer, Aug, 1920) 1920 Gelatin silver print 13.9 x 8.3cm (5 1/2 x 3 5/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Untitled c. 1920-1929 Gelatin silver print 13.7 x 8.5cm (5 7/16 x 3 3/8 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
This exhibition explores the early years of vernacular photography through graceful snapshots of female trios. Displaying more than 500 “found” images the exhibition features photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are taken and kept with the aim of preserving moments in life for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot becomes an image “type” – transferred into the hands of a collector and folded into a broader cultural history?
This subject is explored in the Art Institute of Chicago’s The Three Graces – on view October 29, 2011, through January 22, 2012, in the museum’s Photography Galleries 3 and 4. The exhibition, featuring a private collection of more than 500 anonymous images depicting female trios, spans nearly a century of female role-playing for the camera. These mostly American “found” photographs, spanning from the 1890s to the 1970s, collectively reveal a great deal about the evolving ritual of women’s self-presentation, a theme already idealised in Classical culture with depictions of “The Three Graces.”
New York collector Peter J. Cohen, who has spent decades scouring flea markets, shops, and galleries in search of rare amateur photographs, amassed this image collection and gave it its title. Cohen was struck by the frequency of images featuring female trios, and had the wit to identify in them a playful echo of the Greek muses Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who are said to personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. Cohen owns some 20,000 anonymous snapshots spanning from the late 19th century until the 1970s. He has organised his mountainous holdings according to many classifications, among them “Double Exposures,” “Up on The Roof,” and “Dangerous Women.”
For Art Institute exhibition coordinator Michal Raz-Russo, who also authored the accompanying book, the “three graces” theme serves as a frame through which to chart shifts and continuities in women’s self-understanding across nearly a century. The 1888 introduction of the Kodak #1 camera and the 1900 debut of the Kodak Brownie made photography immensely popular, with much of the marketing was directed at women. Modern life and leisure in the 1920s coincided with the arrival of smaller cameras, faster film speeds, and automatic exposures; women of the expanding middle class became practiced at self-portraiture while vacationing or camping on their own. Later, in the mid-20th century, a clear convergence can be seen between women’s self-portraits and ideals of womanhood promulgated in films and glossy magazines. Throughout this history, men are clearly at work too, convincing women to participate in erotic poses according to another set of visual models. While the varieties of picturing and self-picturing are complex, The Three Graces demonstrates that women worked to define themselves as social beings through photography.
Visitors to the exhibition can find information on individual snapshots – gleaned from inscriptions and the clues provided by clothing and setting – at a special computer kiosk located in the gallery.
Press release from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1920s Gelatin silver print 13.5 x 8.3cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stamped Clyde Banks Photo Services, Crystal Sheer, Aug 5 1932) 1930-1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 11.7 x 7.1cm (4 5/8 x 2 13/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stony Creek Dude Ranch, July 1939, stamped Certified, Master Photo Finishers of America, Fountain Photo Service, May 15 1940) Made 1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 11.6 x 7cm (4 5/8 x 2 13/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stamped Master Photo Finishers of America, Service and Quality, Kay Tone 10 Point Process, Certified Reg. U.S. Pat Off., Caton Photo Co., Detroit, Michigan, Sep 11 1939) Printed 1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 10.7 x 7.9cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/8 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 11.7 x 7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women and a photographer] c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 12.2 x 7.6cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Gym Teachers Linda “Sissy” House, Sarah Beth Jordan, Seanne Livingston, 9th Grade) Printed 1961 Gelatin silver print Paper: 9 x 9 cm (3 9/16 x 3 9/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled 1960-1969 Internal dye diffusion transfer print Paper: 10.8 x 8.9cm (4 5/16 x 3 9/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) Untitled [Three women] 1967 Chromogenic print Image: 11.7 x 9.2cm (4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in.) Paper: 12.7 x 10.2cm (5 x 4 1/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled Printed 1968 Chromogenic print Paper: 9 x 8.6cm (3 9/16 x 3 7/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 14.5 x 8.7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
The Three Graces: Snapshots of Twentieth-Century Women book cover Hardcover – November 29, 2011
Featuring an amazing treasure trove of unpublished images, this intriguing and entertaining book looks at how women explored their identity through popular photography in the 20th century
Snapshots preserve more than individual likeness and memory. Photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are collected with the aim of constructing and preserving a personal identity for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot is subsequently discarded or displaced and becomes merely an “anonymous” image? This and many other questions are discussed in this fascinating selection of anonymous images depicting three women. Presumably all taken by nonprofessionals, these snapshots were acquired over time by a private collector interested in their eclectic yet familiar details, who named the grouping after the iconic Greco-Roman motif.
In traditional western iconography, the Three Graces personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. In the 150 snapshots assembled here, the remarkable consistency of confidence and poise projected by the trios of women – in varied settings, in various states of dress/undress, and over a period of more than fifty years – reveals the formal and behavioral conventions that evolved as photography’s popularity skyrocketed among amateurs. To this end, the iconography of The Three Graces provides a framework for understanding the generational differences and cultural influences that shaped women’s self-presentation in front of the camera in the first half of the 20th century.
Exhibition dates: 15th November, 2011 – 15th April, 2012
Curator: in-house touring exhibition by the National Archives of Australia
Many thankx to The Victorian Archives Centre for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Waves breaking into the pool 1945 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) 1952 Miss Pacific finalists Mary Clifton, Pamela Jansen and Judy Worrad, stand in front of surfboards on Bondi Beach, Sydney 1952 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathing, Sydney Beach, NSW c. 1955 National Archives of Australia
Cossies, togs and bathers
Until the 1940s, Australian women wore decidedly modest, albeit colourful, one-piece swimsuits. But the bikini was already in vogue overseas and by the early 1950s Australian women were daring to wear it. Discover the many fashion statements that could be made by wearing a favourite pair of cossies, togs or bathers!
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Christmas party on Bondi Beach, Sydney 1959 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Santa Claus visits a Sydney beach 1969 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
At the beach
In the 1950s and 1960s, Christmas heralded the start of annual summer holidays for many Australian families. Those who didn’t already live near the coast usually headed towards it, mostly in Holdens and sometimes hauling a caravan. They made tracks to seaside places such as the Gold Coast, Manly, Byron Bay and Sorrento, plonking their bodies on the warm sand, transistors to their ears, to bake in the summer sun. Back then most people seemed unconcerned about sunburn and, as the images show, even beach umbrellas were in short supply.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Bathing beauty 1955 Australian Travel Industry Association collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian Travel Industry Association collection, now held in the National Archives. This series consists of black and white prints and negatives of photographs used in publications, notably Walkabout magazine, produced by the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA).
The Victorian Archives Centre plays host to regular displays of original records from our collection as well as touring exhibitions about Victorian stories. Over Summer, the Victorian Archives Centre will present Summers Past: Golden Days in the Sun 1950-1970, a fascinating photographic exhibition highlighting Australia’s fascination with the sun and sea.
Summers Past will explore our enduring love affair of all things summer, invoking memories of carefree sunny days at the beach in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This is your last chance to view this exhibition before it returns to the National Archives of Australian in April 2012.
So slip on your cossie, slop on the sunscreen and head down to the Victorian Archives Centre this summer!
Summers Past: Golden Days in the Sun 1950-1970 will be on display until April 2012. Entry is free.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathers relax under a low umbrella at Bondi, NSW 1956 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sydney beach scene 1969 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surfer and bikini girl on the sand 1969 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Holiday makers at Surfers Paradise 1959 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Snack bar, Surfers Paradise, QLD 1971 National Archives of Australia
Out and about
Australians have always been fairly laid back and never more so than in summer. Looking at these images from the 1950s and 1960s, it’s plain that sophistication was seldom a consideration when choosing what to wear. On holidays, most people preferred to be comfortable rather than trendy, and bare feet were common on coastal streets, as were unbuttoned shirts and even swimwear.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Holiday makers gather around a car on a hot summer’s day 1964 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf lifesaving, Bondi Beach 1960 National Archives of Australia
Cliff Bottomley (Australian, c. 1907-1981) Preparing canoes 1948 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian News and Information Bureau collection, now held in the National Archives. This vast archival resource is the legacy of nearly half a century’s work by Bureau photographers who captured hundreds of thousands of photographs of Australians at work and play.
Cooling off
It’s no secret that Australia can be very hot, especially in summer. As the song says, we are girt by sea, and for 85 per cent of Australians a blissful dip in the ocean has always been less that two hours’ drive away. For those living further inland, sanctuary was found in a nearby river or lake, or the town’s public swimming pool.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Harbour swimming pool, Manly, New South Wales 1960 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian News and Information Bureau collection, now held in the National Archives. This vast archival resource is the legacy of nearly half a century’s work by Bureau photographers who captured hundreds of thousands of photographs of Australians at work and play.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathers relax on the lawn at the Olympic Pool, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 1966 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf board riders, Torquay, VIC 1967 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Children learning to swim 1945 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Nice one, sport!
Between 1950 and 1970, Australia was triumphant in all the sports we loved. We dominated in the pool, won the Davis Cup a remarkable 15 times, and boasted an impressive record against every Test cricket nation. As these images show, Australian youngsters were keen to play the game, and on most summer Saturdays all around the country, boys and girls would play tennis or cricket, or swim like champions.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Boys with kites 1965 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf carnival 1966 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Mass tennis class 1967 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
The Victorian Archives Centre 99 Shiel Street North Melbourne, Victoria 3051 Australia
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Apple Macintosh Classic 1990 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Apple 20th Anniversary Macintosh 1997 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Apple eMate 300 1997 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Apple iMac Bondi Blue 1998 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg is showing the exhibition Stylectrical – On Electro-Design That Makes History from 26th August 2011 until 15th January 2012. The exhibition takes a look at the complex process of industrial product design in the context of cultural studies. Once again the Museum is taking up a highly topical and socially relevant subject. The focus is on the design of Jonathan Ive (b. 1967), Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, and responsible for creating all of the devices of the California based company. His products are of incomparable popularity on account of their extremely consistent and recognisable design. A quarter of the approximately 400 exhibits are products by Apple, which are shown for the first time in a comprehensive overview.
The exhibition traces a retrospective of works as well as of the company’s internal development of design, and provides a comprehensive insight into research questions of design history by means of this popular design. Along with the products designed by Jonathan Ive, numerous exhibits from the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg will be shown, among them works by Herbert Hirche, Hans Gugelot, Dieter Rams, Peter Raacke, Michele De Lucchi, Hadi Teherani and Tobias Grau. The economic and environmental significance of design will be examined in cooperation with the red dot institute and the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA).
To give a product its shape goes well beyond Luis Sullivan’s often-quoted phrase “form follows function”. Various demands such as material, form, aesthetics, function, handling and usage must be taken into account during the design process and combined. Stylectrical reveals the complex steps and procedures of product design on the basis of the collected works of Jonathan Ive, it thus grants an insight into important discourses on the subject and points to new perspectives on modern design.
The exhibition is the first to show all products that were created since Ive is in charge of design at Apple. Among the exhibits are rarely seen devices such as the eMate300, a laptop from 1997 designed to be used in schools, the iMac Blue Dalmatian, and the company’s first flat screen. New products such as the iPhone 4, the MacBook Air, and the iPad 2 will also be shown. The exhibition lets the visitor trace the company’s design process of the past 14 years. Moreover, by means of these innovative products, it opens a discussion on questions of design theory about form, about use of material and about the manufacturing process. One excursus is devoted to the history of the company’s product development since its founding, with the intention to highlight the working method and special position of the design team within the company. Exhibits of the designers Hartmut Esslinger and Robert Brunner will be shown in this context, and the so-called “Snow White Design Language” will be discussed.
After the return of company founder Steve Jobs in 1997, Apple was restructured and the young designer Jonathan Ive became Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. Before long, Ive and his team caused a stir with their innovative iMac, the iBook and the Power Macintosh G3, which were all milestones of a modernised electronics design in the late 1990’s. Ive’s team turned its back on the established, uniform grey beige as a colour for computers of the past decades, and developed a colourful design made of translucent plastics.
Stylectrical shows the formal links between Jonathan Ive’s design and the works of leading creators of electronics’ design history, and it thoroughly addresses the close relation to products of the German company Braun. In this context the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg will be showing some first-rate items from its own comprehensive collection of post-war industrial design. Early works of the designers Hans Gugelot, Herbert Hirche and Dieter Rams, but also works from recent decades by Michele De Lucchi and Tobias Grau will be on display. After the evolution of design in Germany had come to a near halt during the Second World War, there were various attempts in the 1950s to pick up again where the programmatic developments of the Weimar period had left off. The probably most significant initiative was called into life in 1953 by the founders of the Ulm School of Design. Otl Aicher, Inge Aicher-Scholl and Max Bill adopted for this school the approach of the Bauhaus, which had been closed by the National Socialists. When Max Bill left the institution in 1957, the so-called “Ulm-Model” took the place of the original concept of the school. It had three relevant criteria: a new and systematic methodology of design, the promotion of interdisciplinary teamwork, and a close cooperation with the industry. Important approaches evolved during this time, which are being pursued to this day. Amongst others, the Ulm school worked for electronics’ manufacturers. The cooperation with the Kronberg-based company Braun is especially relevant; the designers from Ulm developed important guidelines that influenced the design of Braun until the 1990s, when Dieter Rams was the chief designer.
The significance of Jonathan Ive’s and his team’s ideas for the history of American industrial design, as well as their influence on all industrial products, are another focus of the exhibition. By means of the outstanding example of Apple it is possible to show how consistent design can sustainably determine the image of a company and contribute significantly to its economic success, as well as influence 21st century society and culture.
Press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Apple iPod 2001 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Apple Power Mac 2003 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Braun Radio-phone combination SK4 1956 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Braun Television set HF 1 1958 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Nintendo Portable game console Gameboy 1995 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Sony Walkman TPS-L2 1979 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Braun Transistor radio T3 1958 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Braun Record player PS1000 1956 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Photo: Roman Raacke
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg
Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Curated by Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey, this show sets up all sorts of telling juxtapositions, while following the thread not just of Richter’s thinking, but of history – and in particular German history – since the second world war. We go from the saturation bombing of Dresden and Cologne to 1960s West German consumerism, from 1970s domestic terrorism to 9/11. There are paintings devoted to Richter’s parents, his aunts and uncles, and what happened to them in wartime. There are paintings devoted to his children, and to becoming a father again in his 60s. He confronts the personal with the public, one kind of history with another. …
Caspar David Friedrich’s German Romanticism, Titian’s Venetian colour, constructivism and postwar gestural painting, minimalism and process art are all grist to Richter’s mill. His 1973 Annunciation After Titian is a reworking from a postcard of the original, while the impossibility of Friedrich’s Romanticism returns time and again in Richter’s seascapes and his Greenland photographs. “I was always looking,” he once said, “for a third way, in which eastern realism and western modernism would be resolved into one redeeming construct.” If this remains Richter’s programme, it is one riven with the irreconcilable, a friction on which his art depends.”
Wedded to this aesthetic of indifference, it seems more than coincidental that he introduced into his practice subject matter directly related to Germany’s recent Nazi past, images from his family album (one of the few possessions he brought over from the East) that most artists would have chosen to keep concealed. Uncle Rudi for instance is a full sizes portrait of his uncle in the uniform of the Wehrmacht – a going away photo, it turns out, as he was to die some months later. What distinguishes this portrait and many others is the addition of Richter’s signature blur. Paint has been dragged across the wet surface with a dry brush, signalling a whole variety of responses. Often interpreted as replicating an out of focus snapshot, evoking speed, or signalling a temporal distancing by underlining the difference between the ‘now’ of the viewer and the ‘then’ of whatever was captured in the photograph, this flurry of soft or hard brush strokes also signals a degree of moral and emotional ambiguity – despite the painter’s insistence on a lack of intentionality on his part. Take his portrait of Aunt Marianne that depicts his maternal aunt cradling Richter as a none-too-happy baby. A schizophrenic, she was sterilized and eventually starved to death by the Nazis. The blur of the brushstrokes bring her and the baby together suggesting the very emotional attachment that Richter was initially keen to disavow. During an interview in 1986 Richter confessed that this dispassionate stance of indifference was mere subterfuge and pretence on his part: “Content definitely – though I may have denied this at one time, by saying that it had nothing to do with content, because it was supposed to be about copying a photograph and giving a demonstration of indifference.”
Anna Leung. “Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern,” on The Arts Section website Nd [Online] Cited 05/12/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gerhard Richter’s extremely productive career needs to be seen against this shift in attitudes and expectations when pictorial references were no longer drawn directly from the natural world but from an ever-growing nexus of information. Empirical data was being rapidly replaced by conceptual data. From 1961 when he settled in West Germany Richter alternated between figuration and non-figuration treating a wide range of subjects and employing a wide variety of means while not valuing one practice over another. As we shall see Richter is equally adept at dealing with historical genres such as the nude, landscape, portraits and history painting as he is in investigating colour and its absence in his monochromes and colour charts and in his densely layered, explosively coloured abstract canvases. For Richter, Abstraction is as real as Realism is abstract, for what fascinates him is not the image per se or its absence but appearance or semblance as our apprehension of appearance. Richter readily admits that it is inevitable that figurative elements be seen in abstraction and denies any difference between what for him is a false polarity. That this panoply of styles remains Richter’s consistent trademark throughout his long career can be seen as we wander through the rooms of this vast exhibition. Each room displays figurative paintings, mostly from photographic imagery, side by side with abstract paintings. There are two exceptions; the first is the room devoted to 18 October 1977, a cycle of fifteen photo-paintings based on the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists in Stammheim high security prison, the second the Cage room of abstract paintings that brings the exhibition to an close. Throughout the exhibition we see Richter appropriating mutually contradictory trends associated with Hyperrealism, Minimalism and Conceptual Art while at the same time honing his craft as a painter to produce some extraordinarily beautiful images. Impossible to categorise he demonstrates his determination to confront the crisis of representation on one hand and that of Germany’s recent history on the other.
Anna Leung. “Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern,” on The Arts Section website Nd [Online] Cited 05/12/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gerhard Richter is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today. Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s eightieth birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career.
As evoked by the title Panorama this exhibition presents a broad look at the wide range of Richter’s practice, discovering contradictions and connections, continuities and breaks. Each room is devoted to a particular moment of his career showing how he explored a set of ideas. While the focus is on painting, the exhibition includes glass constructions, mirrors, drawings, and photographs, and explores how Richter uses these media to ask questions about painting.
The exhibition includes many of Richter’s most well-known works such as Ema (Nude descending a staircase) 1966, Candle 1982, Betty 1988 and Reader 1994. There are also important works that are rarely shown: the first Colour Chart from 1966, 4 Panes of Glass 1967, a triptych of Cloud paintings from 1970, and, for the first time outside Germany, Richter’s monumental twenty metre long painting Stroke (on Red) 1980, based on a photograph of a brush stroke. There are several groups of important abstract paintings including a room of brightly coloured works from the early 1980s, a room of monumental squeegee paintings from the 1990s, and the Cage series 2006.
Richter was one of the first German artists to reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party. In the late 1980s, looking back to the history of radical political activity in West Germany in the 1970s, he produced the fifteen-part work 18 October 1977 1988, a sequence of black and white paintings based on images of the Baader Meinhof group. At the same time as developing a complex body of abstract work, often using squeegees to drag paint across the surface of his canvases, Richter has continued to respond to significant moments in history. In 2005 he painted September, an image of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, which is shown for the first time in the UK in this exhibition.
Richter is often celebrated for the diversity of his approaches to painting. His practice can seem to be structured by various oppositions, with paintings after photographs as well as abstract pictures; traditional still-lifes alongside highly charged subjects; monochrome grey works and multicoloured grids. Some paintings are planned out and ordered; others are the result of unpredictable accumulations of marks and erasures. Richter sometimes maintains these oppositions, but at other times he undoes them. This exhibition shows how he often brings abstraction and figuration together, and explores related ideas in very different looking works. The exhibition reveals breaks and new beginnings in his career, but it also reveals questions that he has asked throughout his life.
Short Biography
Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and after training in the East, moved to West Germany in 1961. He was part of a group of painters working in Düsseldorf, that included Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, who turned to image-based painting during the emergence of American Pop art. Major solo exhibitions include the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972, his first large-scale retrospective at Städtische Kunsthalle und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf in 1986 and Forty Years of Painting, a large-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002. He installed Black Red Gold in the foyer of the Reichstag building in Berlin in 1999 and the window that he designed for Cologne Cathedral was completed in 2007. Richter lives and works in Cologne.”
Gerhard Richter debuted his 15-painting suite 18 October 1977, concerning the radical left-wing Baader-Meinhof Group that had shaken Germany with a two-year campaign of terror, with more public ceremony than usual. At a press conference at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, introducing the pictures before they were first shown in early 1989, he offered a curious speech, reflecting that, “I hope…there is purpose in looking at those deaths, because there is something about them that should be understood.” If Richter’s words recognized the particularly ambitious nature of these paintings among his growing body of work, it also gave listeners little guidance as to what it was that should be understood. …
Soon after, Richter began wiping across the still-wet surface of his photo-paintings with a squeegee to soften the edges and blur the image. This signature blur can evoke a range of things – the motion of the viewer or the camera, the passage of time, but also something more metaphoric, of the type suggested in the artist’s 1971 musing: “My relationship to reality has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness.” At times, Richter also suggested that this fuzzy gaze might serve a role in helping to focus the mind: “You do not see less,” he wrote, “by looking at a field out of focus through a magnifying glass.” In the October cycle, Richter seems to amp his blurring technique up a notch, so that the images are more obscured, more diffuse than usual, in some cases approaching the edge of recognisability.
The date of the title – October 18, 1977 – marks the bloody denouement of a story that had played out over several years in front of a shaken German nation. From 1968 to 1977, the Baader-Meinhof Group led a campaign of shootings and kidnappings aimed at undermining the German state, leaving more than 30 people dead. The group’s founders – Holger Meins, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader – and several other members of the group were arrested and held in Stammheim prison. On October 17, a plane was diverted to Mogadishu by hijackers who demanded the release of the members of the group from prison. Early the next morning, following the successful liberation of the plane by the German military, three of the Baader-Meinhof Group were found dead in their cells from apparent suicide – though the proximity of these events prompted speculation about their cause of death. …
Richter acknowledged how profoundly unsettling he found the events around the Baader-Meinhof Group: “The deaths of the terrorists, and the related events both before and after,” he reflected, “stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my effort to repress it.” Perhaps as a way of processing things, Richter began to collect materials related to the group, holding onto “a number” for years before he began painting the October cycle, filed “under the heading of unfinished business.” In fact, over 100 images related to the Baader-Meinhof Group appear in Atlas, Richter’s ongoing scrapbook-like compendium of photographic source material.
When he began working in earnest on what would become 18 October 1977, Richter drew some of his source images from newspapers and magazines or snapshots of television coverage – markers of the pervasiveness of media coverage of the Baader-Meinhof Group during their violent reign and in its aftermath. But others, taken from police evidentiary photographs, were far less readily available, and serve as tokens of Richter’s preoccupation with the topic and his determined research efforts in preparation for painting. …
The narrative arc Richter creates begins in a banally sweet portrait image of a young woman and ends in a collective ritual of public mourning. Yet both, Richter seems to suggest, are inadequate to our understanding of what has taken place. What truth, he seems to ask, do photographs offer? Can violence or righteousness be discerned in the blur of grays?
But he declined to offer answers: “It is impossible for me to interpret the pictures,” he concluded in notes made for the work’s unveiling. “In the first place they are too emotional; they are, if possible, an expression of speechless emotion. They are the almost forlorn attempt to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief, horror (as if the pictorial repetition of events were a way of understanding these events, being able to live with them).”
Curators: co-organised with the National Gallery of Canada and curated by Dr. David Franklin (then Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada) and Dr. Sebastian Schütze (Professor of Art History at the University of Vienna)
Simon Vouet (French, 1590-1649) The Fortune Teller c. 1620 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Observe if you will:
1/ The treatment of the background behind Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1594-1596)
2/ The tension of the hands in this painting
3/ The pallor of the skin of Sick Bacchus (1593-1594)
4/ The colour of the bunch of grapes in the same painting
5/ The critical distance between the two apricots and the bowed sash resting on the pediment in the same painting
6/ The youthful innocence of the dupe in The Cardsharps (c. 1595)
7/ The deep, foreboding shadows under the eyes of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604-1605)
8/ The astonishingly beautiful skin tones in Gerrit van Honthorst’s Saint Sebastian (c. 1623) and how the blood from the leg wound at left runs in two directions: one direction when Saint Sebastian was standing up, one when he has slumped down. Inspired.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Kimbell Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Not since Michelangelo or Raphael had one artist affected so many of his contemporaries and so irrevocably changed the course of European painting. Caravaggio created a new kind of art: dramatic, deeply emotional, grounded in the vivid details of everyday life, and overwhelmingly human. He used live models, sometimes prostitutes and the very poor, who posed in the studio for his powerful religious scenes as if the events were happening on the streets of Rome. Breaking the boundaries between art and life, he overturned the artistic conventions of the day. He played down details of the setting of a scene, focused on the expressive human figure, and invented a brand of stark realism that shocked many of his patrons.”
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Saint Francis in Ecstasy c. 1594-1595 Oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Gypsy Fortune Teller c. 1595 Oil on canvas 45 1/4 x 59 in. (115 x 150cm) Pinacoteca Capitolina, Musei Capitolini, Rome Public domain
One of the most influential figures in the history of art, Caravaggio (1571-1610) overturned the artistic conventions of the day and created stunningly dramatic paintings, both sacred and secular. This ambitious exhibition explores the profound impact of his work on the wide range of painters of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome. Arranged by theme, it includes over 50 paintings, with Caravaggio’s compelling images juxtaposed with those he inspired. This is the second largest display of his paintings in North America and only the third Caravaggio exhibition to be held in the United States.
Music and Youth
Many of Caravaggio’s early paintings feature handsome youths, whether singly or in groups. He seems to have used the same favorite models repeatedly – and sometimes his own features, which a contemporary tells us he studied in a mirror. The origins of these novel paintings lay in the types of pictures – portraits, still lifes, and allegories – that were painted in a realistic style in the artist’s native Lombardy, in the north of Italy, although he blurred the boundaries between genres to suggest real-life scenes. Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians would have appealed to Roman collectors who were passionate patrons of music, and likely were created to decorate rooms used for performances. They have a dreamy, slightly melancholy air. If the songs are about love, as we can assume they are, they are surely about the painful side of love rather than its joys. Caravaggio’s early paintings of youths are usually scenes of sensual pleasure but with a built-in warning against indulgence, as when a youth has his finger bitten by a lizard lurking in some fruit. He brings us close to his figures, often having them make eye contact with us, and includes lovingly observed still-life details that enhance the naturalism and immediacy of the scene. Even when there is a visitation from the beyond, like the winged Cupid in The Musicians, he treats this in a matter-of-fact way, attentive always to breaking down the boundaries between the painted world and our own. Caravaggio’s musical paintings caught on throughout Europe in the work of his followers, who brought their own innovations to the genre.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Musicians c. 1595 Oil on canvas 36 1/4 x 46 5/8 in (92.1 x 118.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1952
In this scene, Caravaggio shows some young musicians preparing for a concert. We are brought very close to the figures, as if we share the same space. Caravaggio breaks down the boundaries between art and life, and our reality and the painted world become entwined. The instruments are modern, but the musicians wear antique-inspired dress. The lute player tunes his instrument, and the horn player (possibly a self-portrait) catches our gaze. Another youth studies the musical score; it is no longer legible, but doubtless featured love madrigals. The winged Cupid with a quiver of arrows who is handling some grapes makes explicit the bond between music and love. Wine, like music, makes the spirits light. This painting belonged to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who hosted concerts at his palace and invited musicians to live in his household, along with artists like Caravaggio.
Theodoor Rombouts (Flemish, 1597-1637) A Lute Player c. 1620 Oil on canvas 43 7/8 x 39 1/4 in (111.1 x 99.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917
Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians inspired Rombouts’s depiction of a musician tuning his lute. His intense expression suggests that he is both listening to the sound and sizing up the viewer, his audience. The vividly described carpet and still-life objects on the table recall Caravaggio’s similar close-up presentations. However, the colourful treatment of the costume and the robust delineation of the objects place Rombouts’s work within traditions of Flemish and Dutch painting. The still life, like ephemeral music, serves to remind us of the pleasures of life, but also that pleasure is fleeting. The artist also alludes to the five senses: hearing (the lute), taste (the tankard), smell (the pipe), sight (the musical scores), and touch (the knife).
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Boy Bitten by a Lizard 1594-1596 Oil on canvas 25 5/8 x 20 1/2 in (65 x 52cm) Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence
One of Caravaggio’s biographers wrote that “he also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was done meticulously.” The picture has suggested various interpretations. As an allegory of touch, it provides the basis for a study of how emotion is expressed physically, and arguably Caravaggio alludes to all the five senses (flowers as smell and so on). With the still life of fruits and roses, common emblems of love, he invokes age-old adages – pain can follow pleasure, and love is a rose with thorns that prick. Poets from Petrarch onward played on the similarity of the Italian words for “love” and “bitter” – amore and amaro – to which Caravaggio adds ramarro (lizard), ingeniously enlarging the joke.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Sick Bacchus 1593-1594 Oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome
Cardsharps and Fortune Tellers
The young Caravaggio introduced another new kind of painting to the Roman art world with his scenes from the seamy side of life, its frauds and ruses. He painted these works on a large scale with half-length figures, and they were among his most widely imitated creations. His followers played countless variations on the same themes, trying various levels of subtlety and buffoonery in the humour and facial expressions. These highly animated compositions conjure up an underworld of wily cardsharps, soldiers of fortune, foolish dupes, sensuous and deceitful gypsy women, pickpockets, and thugs. They are based partly on everyday observations in the streets, partly on the stock characters and improvised comedies of the commedia dell’arte, partly on sheer fantasy. In such works, Caravaggio and his followers developed ingenious ways of involving us in the action. We read these amusingly moralising pictures through gestures and expressions – but to unravel the trickery takes time. Despite being frozen in a static image, the story seems to unfold before our eyes like one of the popular plays that were its inspiration. The artist extends the theme of deception by painting his subjects with such a high level of naturalism that the viewer is duped and astounded by his artistry.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Cardsharps c. 1595 Oil on canvas 37 1/8 x 51 5/8 in (94.2 x 130.9cm) Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
The players are engaged in a game of primero, a forerunner of poker. Engrossed in his cards, the dupe is unaware that the older cardsharp signals his accomplice, who reaches to pull a hidden card from his breeches. The fingertips of the cheat’s gloved hand are exposed to better feel marked cards. According to an early biographer, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a great patron of the arts, took the young Caravaggio into his household soon after purchasing this picture. It hung along with The Gypsy Fortune Teller in his palace. Together they would surely have reminded the cardinal and his guests of the story of the prodigal son, warning about the perils of greed and fraud. Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature of vice but in a fresh way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms. He structures the picture to allow us to witness everything, implicating us in the trickery.
Saints
Caravaggio grounded his saints in everyday reality, indicating their spiritual states by means of natural phenomena, especially light. In his early painting of Saint Francis, he shows the saint’s ecstasy – his mystic identification with Christ – by directing a strong light upon his figure and the consoling angel. God’s grace is signalled by light in other images of the saints, such as the scene of Mary Magdalene’s conversion from her former life of sin. In paintings of Saints Matthew and Jerome in their studies, much emulated in Caravaggio’s circle, light is a metaphor of divine inspiration. Generally the saints seem to be emerging from darkness into light, which adds drama, symbolism, and also a sense of mass – as if they were sculpted, not merely painted. In a break from Roman and Florentine traditions, Caravaggio rejected the practice of refining his composition through drawings before he began to paint and instead worked directly from a live model in the studio, preserving that model’s particular appearance, never making the features or body conform to an ideal of beauty. The effect, central to Caravaggio’s art and that of many of his followers, was startling. At this time, many people believed that the painting of sacred personages such as saints called for a special, elevated style that set them apart from the mundane reality of the here and now. Caravaggio’s radical departure from this principle brought him much harsh criticism. He was accused of merely copying and so failing to capture a higher truth. But others recognised in his work a new kind of religious art that directly engaged the faithful and made old subjects new and alive.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness 1604-1605 Oil on canvas 68 x 52 in (172.7 x 132.1cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase William Rockhill Nelson Trust
Caravaggio’s practice of painting a live model in his studio brings this young, brooding saint to life – as if his image were inhabited by the model’s being. Ottavio Costa, a Roman banker, commissioned this painting for a chapel on a pilgrimage route in the countryside outside of Genoa, where his family had its origins. We can imagine what a powerful experience it would have been to encounter the image of the scarlet-robed saint there, dramatically emerging from the shadows into a strong light. When Caravaggio delivered the painting, Costa decided to keep it and placed a copy in the chapel. But even the copy proved inspiring. An early guide described how it “moves not only the members of the brotherhood but also visitors to penitence.”
Gerrit van Honthorst (Dutch, 1592-1656) Saint Sebastian c. 1623 Oil on canvas The National Gallery, London
The Sacred Narrative
Caravaggio was a masterful storyteller who could bring home the drama and significance of a biblical event with tremendous power. In his scenes from the Old and New Testaments, he created a new kind of painting – dramatic, even theatrical, yet grounded in the observation of ordinary reality – and it proved infectious among his contemporaries in Rome. His approach was to make the scene clear and simple, with the main actors in the drama seen close-up and caught in mid-action at a decisive moment, embodying the whole meaning of the event. He played down the setting, sometimes to the point that it is a mere pool of darkness from which the figures emerge. It was the actions and states of mind of the characters in the story that counted, and Caravaggio presented these with sometimes shocking directness and intensity, breaking all the rules of decorum that restrained more conventional painters. He mastered the art of concealing art, re-creating a scene with such a flavour of reality that it comes across as an eyewitness account. It was his power to draw viewers into the emotion and importance of a scene that made his work an essential object of study, even for such an independent genius as the great Peter Paul Rubens.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Martha and Mary Magdalene c. 1598 Oil and tempera on canvas 38 1/2 x 52 1/4 in (97.8 x 132.7cm) Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Kresge Foundation and Mrs. Edsel B. Ford
Martha’s expressive hands, intensely illuminated, underscore her attempt to convert her sister Mary Magdalene from a life of worldly pleasures to one of spirituality. Several details recall Mary’s life of indulgence: the elegant dress, the ivory comb, the alabaster cosmetic jar. The mirror, a powerful symbol of vanity, becomes here an instrument reflecting the divine light that is penetrating Mary’s soul. Martha’s words seem to have been convincing, and her open mouth signals her amazement as she witnesses Mary’s transformation. The orange blossom in Mary’s right hand and the ring on her left indicate her new status as the blessed bride of Christ.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Sacrifice of Isaac 1602-1603 Oil on canvas 41 x 53 1/8 in (104 x 135cm) Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Orazio Gentileschi (Italian, 1563-1639) Saint Francis in Ecstasy c. 1607 Oil on canvas 49 5/8 x 38 5/8 in. (126 x 98 cm) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640) The Entombment c. 1612-1614 Oil on panel 34 3/4 x 26 1/8 in. (88.3 x 66.5 cm) National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Purchased 1956 Public domain
Bartolomeo Manfredi (Italian, 1582-1622) David and Goliath (The Triumph of David) c. 1615 Oil on canvas 50 3/8 x 38 1/4 in. (128 x 97cm) Musée du Louvre, Paris Acquired in 1990
Jusepe de Ribera (Spanish, 1591-1652) Saints Peter and Paul c. 1616 Oil on canvas 49 5/8 x 44 1/8 in. (126 x 112cm) Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg Public domain
Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632) Fortune Teller with Soldiers c. 1620 Oil on canvas 58 7/8 x 93 7/8 in. (149.5 x 238.5cm) Toledo Museum of Art Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment. Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey Public domain
Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632) David with the Head of Goliath and Two Soldiers 1620-1622 Oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Public domain
Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Italian, 1587-1625) The Sorrows of Aminta c. 1625 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 47 1/4 in. (100 x 120cm) Musée du Louvre, Paris Gift of Paul Jamot, 1937 Public domain
Kimbell Art Museum 3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth, TX 76107
I had no idea how magnificent Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven was. The paintings are sublime, full of light, colour and texture: they perfectly capture the atmosphere of outback Canada.
As the curator observes, “These artists produced some of the most vibrant and beautiful landscapes of the twentieth century.”
I couldn’t agree more.
A joy to see, these impressions leave one spellbound. Finally, something delicious in landscape painting!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Dulwich Picture Gallery for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Bicentenary year of momentous exhibition firsts is to continue in October with Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. The exhibition forms part of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s North American series showcasing the work of artists rarely seen in the UK.
Painting Canada will feature some of Canada’s most iconic landscape paintings. These bold and exciting works were first celebrated not in Canada, but in London, at the British Empire exhibitions at Wembley in 1924 and 1925. Since then, despite becoming greatly revered in Canada, the work of Thomson and the Group of Seven has been virtually unknown on the international stage. This major exhibition will reintroduce them to the British public, with an astonishing 122 paintings on display as well as Tom Thomson’s sketchbox.
Tom Thomson and J. E. H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston and Franklin Carmichael met as employees of the design firm Grip Ltd. in Toronto. The other two members of the Group were A. Y. (Alexander Young) Jackson from Montreal and Lawren Harris, effectively the Group’s leader, and a man of considerable personal wealth. They often met at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto to discuss their opinions and share their art.
The artists, sometimes known as the ‘Algonquin Park School’ at this stage, received indirect monetary support from Harris (heir to the Massey-Harris farm machinery fortune) and direct support from Dr. James MacCallum a wealthy Toronto ophthalmologist and collector. Harris and MacCallum collaborated to build a studio building that opened in 1914 to serve as a meeting and working place for the proposed new Canadian art movement.
The progress of this informal group of artists was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I and a further severe blow came in 1917 when Thomson died while canoeing in Algonquin Park. The circumstances of his death and subsequent burial have remained mysterious, the source to this day of myriad conspiracy theories.
Thomson’s seven artist friends reunited after the war. They continued to travel throughout Canada, sketching the landscape and developing techniques to represent such wild and diverse terrain in their art. In 1920 they finally came together as the Group of Seven and held their first exhibition under that name. Prior to this, the art establishment’s view of the Canadian landscape was that it was either unpaintable or too wild and uncouth to be worthy of being painted. Reviews for the 1920 exhibition were mixed, but as the decade progressed the Group came to be recognised as pioneers of a new, Canadian, school of art. Nowadays, the Group and Tom Thomson are iconic in their native country; every schoolchild is familiar with masterpieces such as Thomson’s The Jack Pine, arguably the most famous and beloved painting in Canada.
Dulwich Picture Gallery is proud to partner with the National Gallery of Canada on this exhibition, with generous support of loans also coming from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Art Gallery of Ontario and other lenders. These institutions are lending some of the most famous paintings in Canada. Additionally, a special revelation of the show is provided by the rich group of works to be found in private collections.
Painting Canada has been planned as a journey through Canada, framed by two grand rooms dedicated individually to Tom Thomson’s electrifying sketches and paintings of Algonquin Park and Lawren Harris’s other-worldly paintings of the Arctic and the Rocky Mountains. Between these two ‘poles’, a selection of the very best work of Thomson and the Group of Seven will be on display. A special feature of the show will be the juxtaposition, wherever possible, of the initial sketch with the finished canvas. One room will in fact be devoted entirely to a display of these vibrant sketches, which represent one of the most impressive contributions of Canada to twentieth-century art.
Ian Dejardin said: “These artists produced some of the most vibrant and beautiful landscapes of the twentieth century. The Canadians have kept this particular light under a bushel for far too long – I am proud, and frankly amazed, that this is to be the very first major exhibition of their work to be held in this country since the sensation of their first showing here in 1924. As for Tom Thomson – what he achieved in his tragically short career (just 4 or 5 years) is extraordinary. He is Canada’s very own Van Gogh – prepare to be dazzled.”
Tom Thomson was born near Claremont, Ontario on 5 August, 1877. A turning point in his life came in 1909 when he joined the staff of Grip Ltd., a prominent Toronto photo-engraving house. The firm’s head designer, artist-poet J.E.H. MacDonald, contributed much to Thomson’s artistic development, sharpening his sense of design. However, Thomson’s career as a fine artist lasted barely four or five years; it was cut short in July 1917, when his canoe was found floating on Canoe Lake, empty. His body surfaced days later, triggering decades of speculation as to his fate. More sensational than these stories, however, was the burst of creativity that had preceded his death. In his last two years, Thomson had developed an artistic language that seemed to capture the unique qualities of the Canadian landscape – painterly, vibrant in colour, in tune with the subtle change of the seasons. The Canadian wilderness had been previously considered too wild and untamed to inspire ‘true’ art.
His fellow employees at Grip Ltd. included Arthur Lismer, F.H. Varley, Franklin Carmichael and Frank Johnston – all adventurous young painters who often organised weekend painting trips to the countryside around Toronto. After Tom’s death, a memorial exhibition was arranged and these men, together with Lawren Harris and A. Y. Jackson, would go on to form in 1920 the Group of Seven, probably the most famous artistic force in Canadian art history. Along with Thomson they created a landscape style that to this day infl uences the way Canadians visualise their own country and their best paintings have become national icons.
Lawren Harris (Canadian, 1885-1970)
Lawren Harris was born on 23 October 1885, in Brantford, Ontario. He attended St. Andrew’s College in Toronto before studying art in Berlin, Germany, from 1904 to 1908. He then returned to Toronto, where he began painting post-impressionist street scenes of its older and poorer areas. By 1919 Harris’s landscapes had become increasingly sombre and his brush stroke more expressive. His affection for Scandinavian landscape painting was one of the key factors in the formulation of the Group of Seven’s approach to the Ontario woods, which Harris himself painted with gusto and attention. His later style was grandly beautiful and austere, finding its most characteristic subject matter in the awesome landscapes of Lake Superior, the Rockies and the Canadian Arctic.
A. Y. Jackson (Canadian, 1882-1974)
Alexander Young Jackson, or “A. Y.” as he was fondly known, was born in Montreal on 3 October, 1882. Like other members of the Group of Seven he was trained as a commercial artist and for many years made his living by that means. He apprenticed to a Montreal lithographer at the age of 12, and though he later spent two and a half years in France studying painting, he was soon back in Canada paying his rent by designing cigar labels. In the following years after the formation of the Group of Seven he painted the Arctic, the West Coast, the Prairies, and Ontario’s north woods, as well as his beloved St. Lawrence, where his countless sketching expeditions earned him the nickname Père Raquette-Pappa Snowshoe.
Arthur Lismer (Canadian born United Kingdom, 1885-1969)
Arthur Lismer celebrated the powerful beauty of the Canadian landscape in his own expressionist style. His paintings are characterised by vivid colour, deliberately coarse brushwork and a simplified form. Lismer was born in Sheffield, England. At the age of 26, he immigrated to Canada seeking work as a commercial illustrator. It was at Grip Ltd. in Toronto that he met a group of other talented young artists who were to become the Group of Seven. Together, they organised trips to explore and sketch the wilderness – capturing the spirit of Canada in their work, and setting Canadian art on a bold and original new course. Although Lismer painted throughout his life, he devoted the majority of his time to art education. A gifted teacher, Lismer pioneered the field of child art education across Canada and around the world.
Frederick Horsman Varley (Canadian born United Kingdom, 1881-1969)
Varley was born in 1881 in Sheffield, England. He studied painting at Sheffield and Antwerp and went to work in London as a commercial illustrator. In 1912 he came to Canada, where he found himself working in the same commercial studio as Tom Thomson. With Thomson and the others he took to painting Northern Ontario landscapes, and also began to do considerable work as a portrait painter. In 1926 Varley moved to Vancouver to become Head of Drawing, Painting & Composition at the newly formed Vancouver School of Decorative & Applied Arts. In 1933 he founded his own school, the British Columbia College of Arts, but this venture led to his bankruptcy in 1935 and by then his marriage had also collapsed. The next years were difficult for Varley, most of them spent suffering from alcoholism in Montreal. In 1945, however, he returned to Toronto and slowly began to work again. He died in Toronto in 1969.
Franklin Carmichael (Canadian, 1890-1945)
Carmichael, the son of a carriage maker, was born in Orillia, Ontario on 4 May, 1890. He arrived in Toronto in 1911 with some training in commercial art, and soon found himself the associate of Tom Thomson and a number of other commercial artists who were teaching themselves to be serious painters. In 1913 he went to Antwerp to study painting but was soon back in Ontario to participate in the founding of the Group of Seven, of which he was the youngest member. In 1932 he was appointed Head of Graphic and Commercial Art at the Ontario College of Art. He died in Toronto in 1945.
Frank (Franz) Johnston (Canadian, 1888-1949)
Johnston was an original member but only showed in the Group’s first exhibition. Johnston’s style and technique – he very often painted in tempera – differed from that of the other Group of Seven members. His work was extremely decorative, and sold well – a fact that led to his early departure from the Group, since he felt he could earn more disassociated from the initial critical outrage that greeted the first Group exhibitions.
J. E. H. MacDonald (Canadian born United Kingdom, 1873-1932)
John Edward Hervey MacDonald challenged and vastly broadened the scope of Canadian Art. MacDonald believed that art should express the “mood and character and spirit of the country”, and he portrayed his vision in vast panoramas using dark, rich colours and a turbulent patterned style. MacDonald was born in Durham, England, and moved to Canada at the age of fourteen. He trained as an artist in Hamilton and Toronto, pursuing a career in commercial art. In 1895 he joined Grip Ltd. in Toronto where he met and encouraged other staff members, including Tom Thomson, Frank Carmichael, Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley, to paint with him on weekends – laying the groundwork for what would later become Canada’s famous Group of Seven. He was the oldest member of the Group. His early death led directly to the disbanding of the Group in 1933.
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Since the early 1970s Haacke has taken on the intertwined political and corporate forces that use cultural patronage as a smokescreen to advance interests that are often antithetical to the vitality of free speech and expression in democracies. Haacke made this work just as the strategy of appropriation – lifting an image out of its original context and re-presenting it in critical fashion – began to make waves in the New York art world of the late 1970s. Like all effective appropriation, it exposes a prior instance of borrowing – in this case, how the investment firm Paine Webber used a documentary photograph to give its annual report the veneer of social concern. The artist then pointedly contrasted it with an image from the same annual report of a beaming trio of executives in a painting-lined gallery. As a counterpoint to the protestor’s signboard, Haacke dropped in text from a different Paine Webber ad campaign to show on whose backs the “risk management” is taking place – a biting indictment, the relevance of which has only increased since the recent economic downturn.
Wall’s staged tableaux straddle the worlds of the museum and the street. His subjects are scenes of urban and suburban disarray that he witnessed firsthand – the kinds of things anyone might see while wandering around a city and its outskirts. Working like a movie director, he restages the scene using nonprofessionals as actors and presents his photographs as colour transparencies in light boxes such as those of large-scale public advertisements found at airports and bus stops. The scale and ambition of his pictures – scenes of everyday life shot through with larger intimations of political struggle – equally evoke the Salon paintings of nineteenth century French painters such as Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, which were themselves brazen combinations of canonical and contemporary subjects.
The Storyteller is set in a barren, leftover slice of land next to a highway overpass in Vancouver, where the artist lives. Various groupings of modern urban castaways – perhaps descendants of the Native Americans who occupied the land before the arrival of Europeans – are dispersed around the hillside, a mini-catalogue of art-historical reference. Like the upside-down, half-submerged figure of Icarus in the background of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the woman speaking and gesticulating to the two men listening at the lower left becomes the key to unifying the fractured and alienating environment from which Wall’s picture is constructed.
The early 1990s marked the last moment when a wide swath of women artists responded to the sexism they saw as pervasive in the culture – from the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas. A pioneer of set-up photography, Simmons dramatically expanded the scale of her constructed tableaux for a series of spotlighted puppet-like objects perched atop doll legs: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. This armed and dangerous example refers to the old-movie cliché where a man carrying a gun is shown in shadow profile. Here, Simmons offers instead the death-dealing seductress – also familiar from film noir – in monumental miniature, a doll capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice.
In the middle of the 1990’s, diCorcia gained international recognition for his large color photographs of street scenes and passersby. For an earlier series, he traveled to Los Angeles on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and worked on a part of Santa Monica Boulevard frequented by male prostitutes and drug addicts. For each picture he made there, he carefully composed his setting, then asked young men to pose for him, giving them a small fee (from twenty to fifty dollars) that was negotiated each time.
At that time, NEA support of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe was highly controversial, and diCorcia had to sign a document stating that he would not produce any “obscene” work while on his fellowship. He set up the whole negotiating procedure as a symbolic way of sharing his grant with people whose behavior would surely have been condemned by the censors. The titles always mention the name, the age and the origin of the model, as well as the amount paid. The staged situation interacts with the raw reality of the exchange of money, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, yet preserving an authentic emotional charge.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection from March 22, 2011, through January 2, 2012, in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features 25 photographs dating from 1979 to the present by 15 contemporary artists.
The exhibition’s title, After the Gold Rush, is taken from a classic 1970 song by Neil Young, whose verses contrast a romanticised past with a present of squandered plenty and an uncertain future. Inspired by the recent political and economic upheavals in America and abroad, this selection juxtaposes new photographs that take the long view of the world’s current condition with prescient works from the 1980s and 1990s that remain startlingly relevant today.
This is the first occasion for the Museum to present recently acquired works by: Gretchen Bender, James Casebere, Moyra Davey, Katy Grannan, Hans Haacke, An-My Lê, Curtis Mann, Trevor Paglen, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Also featured are photographs by: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Gober, Adrian Piper, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Williams.
After the Gold Rush begins with Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber (1979) – the first work by this legendary provocateur of Conceptual art to enter the Metropolitan’s collection. Haacke’s biting photo-diptych is so pertinent to the recent economic downturn that it seems as if it could have been made yesterday. In this work, the artist appropriated images from the investment firm’s annual report to convey his viewpoint that big business provides a veneer of social concern to mask the brutal effects of the “risk management” they offer their clients.
Other works in After the Gold Rush use varying degrees of artifice and photographic realism to reflect on marginalised and repressed voices. Measuring over 14 feet long and presented as a backlit transparency in a light box, The Storyteller (1986) is Jeff Wall’s signature image and is typical of his method. Working from memory, the artist uses nonprofessional actors and real locations to meticulously restage a scene of urban blight that he witnessed in his native Vancouver. Wall plays this photographic verisimilitude against compositions and figural poses indebted to French painters such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Georges Seurat. A comparison of Wall’s Storyteller with Courbet’s Young Ladies of the Village (1852), on view in the Museum’s galleries for Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, reveals parallels: in both, a keenly observed moment of telling social interaction taking place on a sloping landscape. Each artist has combined a daringly modern subject with references to earlier art.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia is another key figure in the development of staged photography. In the early 1990s, the artist created a series of works in response to the political attacks on gays and federal funding of the arts in the U.S. DiCorcia hired male hustlers to pose for their portraits out on the streets – and paid them with grant money he received from the National Endowment for the Arts. At the same moment, a wide swath of women artists addressed issues of sexism and racism: examples of this politically pointed art are represented by Laurie Simmons’ Walking Gun (1991) – a spotlighted puppet of doll legs and a revolver that seems capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice – and Adrian Piper’s 1992 work Decide Who You Are #24 (A Moving Target), which includes a childhood image of Anita Hill as part of a blistering meditation in word and image on racial politics. Such works are missives from a time not so long ago when artists regularly commented on present-day politics and culture through their art. (Because of light sensitivity, this work by Adrian Piper will be on view through Sunday, September 26.)
Although the recently made photographs in After the Gold Rush seem at first glance to be less overtly political than their predecessors, they nevertheless address vital issues about contemporary society. James Casebere’s epic vision of America, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, (2009), is based on a tabletop model that the artist spent 18 months building. The photograph shows a suburban subdivision of the kind recently ravaged by the foreclosure crisis, and its sunny sense of “Morning in America” comments ironically on the country’s future prospects. An-My Lê’s similarly sweeping five-part photographic piece Suez Canal Transit, USS Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt (2009) will also be featured. Lê is interested in the way in which U.S. armed forces come into contact with the rest of the world. This major new work – which seems at first to be a straightforward panorama of military might overseas – subtly undercuts the viewer’s expectations to question the current position of the U.S. on the global stage.
Trevor Paglen is a young artist whose works plot the “black world” of covert military operations, from telephoto images of predator drones taken from miles away, to software that follows planes used for the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists. Paglen’s 2008 photograph KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186) shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by artists including Carleton Watkins. To make these and other photographs, Paglen collaborated with amateur astronomers who were originally trained by the U.S. government to look out for Soviet satellites during the Cold War, but turned their attention to American surveillance in recent years.
The final piece in After the Gold Rush is a suite of five recently acquired photographs from 2007-2009 by the celebrated photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The grouping shifts focus from macro to micro: from expansive aerial views of Shanghai and Dubai to close ups that suggest the smallest increments of sustenance and regeneration. Taken together, they evoke the interconnectedness of all things and a grounding of the political in the personal as a way for an engaged yet expressive art.
Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
It was in 1990 – at the height of a worldwide economic recession that also marked the end of the 1980s art bubble – that Davey began photographing the scratched, worn-away surfaces of pennies, the most devalued and lowest form of currency. Her accumulation of one hundred micro-photographic specimens is constructed around the readymade patterns of decay that countless anonymous owners have unconsciously wrought upon their surfaces; their base materiality is incisively contrasted with the most elevated of national symbols. As with all of Davey’s work, there is a melancholic sense of loss that connects subject and form: like pennies, photographs are objects of exchange imprinted by contact with the world around them.
Piper is an artist and a philosophy professor who works in a variety of media, including performance, video, sound pieces, photography, drawing, and writing. She often explores issues of autobiography, racism, and stereotyping. For her 1992 series Decide Who You Are, the artist used a triptych format in which a different appropriated photograph is flanked by an image of the “three wise monkeys” maxim advocating “See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil” at left, and at right a photograph of a young girl who, though not identified, is Anita Hill – who had recently been thrust into the spotlight for accusing then-nominee for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The verse in the left panel changes in each individual work in the series, while that on the right is unchanging – what the artist once described as “a comprehensive, textbook compendium of commonly invoked litanies of denial and intimidation, from the bland to the vaguely menacing” and “a must for novices and aspiring leaders in business, politics, and culture.”
Robert Gober works primarily in sculpture, installations, and photography. He is perhaps best known for his delicate, ghostly hand crafted versions of domestic fixtures, such as drains, beds, doors, and sinks. Through these uncanny replicas, Gober invests mass produced objects with personal meaning – the private, unruly desires and memories of the individual. This image appeared in the book (his first in the genre) that Gober created to accompany his installation representing the United States at the 2000 Venice Biennale. In it, the artist interweaves his own journey to New York in 1978 as a young gay man with the toxic fallout of homophobic recrimination that accompanied the murder of the Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard twenty years later.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.
Trained as a geographer, Paglen is an artist who plots the topography of a new global and celestial space – the “black world” of covert military operations. Examples of his subjects include the supposed sites used for the extraordinary rendition of prisoners, which he shoots with specially designed cameras from up to forty miles away, and the network of private planes used to transport them under the radar. This image shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by the photographer Carleton Watkins when the West was still being explored. In order to track such spacecraft, Paglen uses a database created by amateur astronomers who were trained by the U.S. government to search the skies for Soviet sputniks but continued their hobby after the end of the Cold War by tracking our own satellites. In this work, the artist brings into one composition two historically disparate moments in geographic and celestial colonisation.
![Artist unknown (American) '[Three women]' c. 1930s from the exhibition 'The Three Graces' at The Art Institute of Chicago, October 2011 - January 2012](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1930s.jpg "Artist unknown (American) '[Three women]' c. 1930s from the exhibition 'The Three Graces' at The Art Institute of Chicago, October 2011 - January 2012")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three women]' c. 1910s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1910s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three women]' c. 1910s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1920s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1920s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1920s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1940s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1940s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1940s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women and a photographer]' c. 1940s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1940s-b.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women and a photographer]' c. 1940s")
![Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) 'Untitled [Three women]' 1967](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/homburger-three-women.jpg "Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) 'Untitled [Three women]' 1967")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1930s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1930s-b.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1930s")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.